Route 17

Monday, August 4th, 2008
Let’s take a trip to Munkatch in March, 1933, five minutes to midnight .
First stop: The wedding of the Rabinowitz boy to Frime Chaye Rivke Shapira - daughter of the Munkatch rebbe, Eleazer Shapira. The bride was to become the mom of the present Munkatcher and Dinover Rebbes.

Monday, August 18th, 2008
“Well I dreamed I saw
A child of God,
He was walking along the road…”
- Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
Last weekend, Aug. 15-18, was the 39th anniversary of Woodstock, at Yasgur’s Farm on Hurd Road, right off Route 17B. I was in Camp Hili that summer, less than a mile away, across White Lake. One could hear Janis Joplin through the clouds in the night.

Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Call me nostalgic, but my favorite part of the Russian-Georgian war was the Cossacks.
In the end, you need your enemy. If the Dodgers disappeared from the face of the earth, Giants fans would be the sorrier. Many college football fans hate Notre Dame but everyone wants to see them play. I’d like to see the Cossacks, provided I’m not dressed like Motle Kamzoil when they come galloping by.

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
I’m as sympathetic as the next guy to the idea of a “united” Jerusalem but I love Jews more than I love Arab neighborhoods and meaningless municipal boundaries that have zero historic validity. It’s time to keep those parts of Jerusalem that Jews actually live in and visit, and throw the rest overboard.

Sunday, July 6th, 2008
All good Americans, at some point, ought to visit Cooperstown, a most beautiful village rightfully known for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but if you’re planning a visit, consider an excursion to Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum, about a mile north of the Hall.

Friday, July 11th, 2008
History is written by the winners, and so is the Torah. Korach is depicted as a bad guy, when an honest reading of the last three-and-a-half books of the Torah suggest that Moses was a singularly uninspiring leader, a less poetic speaker than most any prophet that followed, and just begging for a challenge from Korach or anyone else. Whatever Korach’s failings, the tragedy of the Korach story is that a more suitable challenger to Moses was surely intimidated into silence by the heavy-handed obliteration of Korach.

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
The housing crisis we keep hearing about is being reported almost entirely from the vantage point of speculators and sellers. But if you are a young couple starting out in life, seeking to buy your first apartment or home, why is it a crisis if the housing market is in a recession, prices dive and you can suddenly afford to buy?

Friday, July 18th, 2008
When Jews talk dictators, we’re talking the 1930s and ’40s, the great heyday of dictators. But now the great dictator action has shifted from Europe to the African, Asian and Arab world - yes, that “world” before whom we should feel ashamed because of how we treat prisoners and conduct foreign policy.

Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Barack Hashem Obama’s followers still don’t get it, beside showing themselves to be as humorless as Satmar and easily the most paranoid and thin-skinned political operators since Richard Nixon.

Monday, July 28th, 2008
Everyone one of us who cares about news is familiar with Reuters. But until I heard “The Writer’s Almanac” on NPR the other day, it never occurred to me that there was a man, Paul Reuter, who started it all, let alone that he was the son of a rabbi who converted to Christianity. You can hear Garrison Keillor tell you about the man by clicking here: